Dear Readers,
As the editor of Development Southern Africa, I am pleased to introduce an exciting addition to the journal's regular features. The journal is launching a debate section which aims to be a forum that encourages diverse voices to raise and discuss issues that have an impact on development. Through this platform, the journal hopes to create an interactive space where academics, policy makers, and community members can discuss development issues.
In line with this, we intend to occasionally publish a provocative peer reviewed article that raises issues that impact substantially on how we understand development and the various factors that influence and are influenced by it. The articles will be given prominence not necessarily because they resolve issues, but because they open up avenues for debate and allow us to elicit responses on a number of topics. Every issue of DSA will include responses to one or more of the articles that have appeared in this section.
We are pleased to launch this section with the publication of Raymond Suttner's article entitled ‘Talking to the Ancestors’. Talking to the Ancestors opens up debate on a variety of unexplored or insufficiently explored areas. Suttner reopens debate on a number of questions that may have seemed settled or that have not been engaged in the way he does. We give prominence to this contribution because it unsettles interpretations of many elements of South African history, epistemology, knowledge systems, gender and other areas. The piece tries to rethink the Freedom Charter in the context of national building, heritage and democratic processes. In doing so, it attributes new meanings to some of the words of the Charter like ‘the people’ and ‘brotherhood’.
Suttner's article is at once a local intervention and one of much wider significance. His piece makes a number of paradigmatic interventions which have an impact on a variety of disciplines. It challenges prevailing methodological practices, for example, the ever-recurrent tendency to imprison complex phenomena within dichotomies. His article is especially powerful because of his use of the personal: parts of the article are influenced directly by his own experiences, which have raised epistemological questions for Suttner as a Marxist. Instead of evading these issues, he has put them in the public domain without pretending to have resolved them.
With the publication of this initial debate article, we invite readers to engage with ‘Talking to the Ancestors’ from any angle that attracts their attention in order to enrich it, show its errors or propose alternative interpretations or meanings to the areas that Suttner covers. This might include, but is not limited to, developmental implications of the Freedom Charter, challenging interpretations of ‘the people’ as beneficiaries of the Charter, notions of knowledge, science, rationality, gender and development, the nation and nation building. Responses to the debate articles should in general be no more than 2000 words.
We look forward to engendering a culture of dialogue on development on the continent.
Caroline Kihato
Editor